Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
Yeah I posted that on here a couple of weeks back. Ocado's priority for generating revenue is increasing module uptake at existing sites so sales increases like that makes that more likely.
Ok Stupmy, you are right
Just looked through Instacart's full year earnings release. Presented as a "Letter to Shareholders".
This is not a serious company.
D1 are so smart that they invested in Instacart at a 39bn dollar valuation in 2021. Up significantly from the 2020 value of 7.5bn.
When it listed last year it did so at about 8bn.
Looking at the big D1 Capital short that seems to be related to their long position on Instacart.
I feel comfortable with that. The Ocado/Kroger partnership is primarily about delivering people's weekly grocery shop. You can't deliver chilled and frozen with Instacart so they are operating in somewhat different spaces.
It's like saying Deliveroo are going to cause Ocado sales to decline because their riders are going to Tesco to pick up a bottle of coke and a couple of pizzas.
D1 have an office in Miami so could be them aggressively pushing the Miami spoke closure fluff.
Stupmy- Buffett is pretty much the originator of the don't try to time the market idea.
He made money from learning as much as he could about a business and then sticking to his convictions.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/buffett-on-market-timing-165102647.html
Post about Ocado Automated Storage and Retrieval liked on LinkedIn by an Argos logistics manager.
She has a recommendation on LinkedIn written by the Coles Head of CFC Operations.
Fluff with no substance of course but Argos owner Sainsbury's have been starting to make more investment in warehouse automation.
That second paragraph sounds to me like they are looking out for discounted, more mature assets from distressed holders that can quickly be written up in value rather than further deployments to Series A rounds and seed.
I feel the portfolio is really bloated now. I hope the capital allocation plan involves some provision to reduce the debt burden.
You can't have it both ways VP.
First you say they won't be getting any more CFC orders and now you say they are running out of cash. This despite the fact that what would deplete the cash pile most would be having to pay for more CFCs
It's an investment trust type company.
They say the NAV per share is about 660p but carrying an enormous discount
Https://www.lse.co.uk/ShareChat.html?ShareTicker=GROW&share=Molten-Ventures
Was ftse250 before demotion
I mentioned GROW on here the other day when at about 250 as showing some unexplained movement. I don't do charts but I imagine it must have an interesting one over the last 12 months. Lots of swings up and down. Up to 273 today.
VP, did you copy and paste that from your post the other day?
They seem very similar.
Losses stem from ongoing investment in R&D.
One of the partners who have paused new CFCs is Ocado Retail, which is part of the group so they are pausing paying development fees to themselves.
They are now back over 75% capacity at the existing sites.
Kroger closed spokes they set up and ran themselves. Nothing to do with Ocado as they run the CFCs and managing delivery operations is Kroger's responsibility. The modules at the CFCs will have been drawn down and still have to be paid for by Kroger.
The Walmart article you quote is not representative of the full range of investments Walmart has made across their business in automation. They have invested in and partnered with a number of leading automation companies like Symbotic.
My original point was what are the big UK supermarkets doing to automate in contrast to the likes of the US, Germany, Japan and Korea.
Ocado probably prefer to describe themselves as a tech company as calling themselves a robotics company is probably too narrow. It doesn't really account for their own software packages that they have developed etc
And automation is probably a much better word to use than robotics.
But by keep analysing them as if they were a pure play online supermarket and applying a valuation multiple in line with Tesco's rather than say Amazon's doesn't do anyone any favours.
Endomag was one of the companies I had spotted as a solid sign of value before they started including it in the core.
As with a number of other companies in the portfolio they were working to deliver a solution to a well defined problem in this case, an improved diagnostic device for planning operations for breast cancer and preventing unnecessary ones on lymph nodes.
Turned out a good return on the £9m invested. You could see they were a well performing company as they had finance from mainstream lenders for working capital.
Shame they have to be bought by a US company to continue their growth.
Should get closer to £500m on Solutions for 2024 as 15-20% growth forecast on 2023 figure of £420m.
Some £360m of that was from recurring revenue as in the fees and cut of sales from existing CFCs.
One of the reasons ARM chose to relist on the US market rather than the UK one was the greater depth of knowledge and understanding of it's business they would get from US analysts. No doubt they anticipated the sneering comments they would get from the likes of Clive Black complaining about "enormous losses" whilst making ongoing investment in R&D.
I mean with Ocado is it really that surprising that a high tech robotics company needs to keep reinvesting to stay ahead in an industry with incredibly fast moving developments in new technology?
FT article on the AGM quotes Clive Black from Shore Capital to complain about the incentive scheme.
All well and good but again Clive is very clearly an analyst specialising in supermarkets, with many news items quoting him on the likes of M&S, Aldi and the rest.
Don't think his understanding of building a high growth tech business from scratch will be that great. It would be interesting to know if he could answer fairly basic questions about the Solutions business.
Agreed 100%. I am not bothered in the least about the SP at the moment.
The investments made in tech by the likes of Walmart and Kroger/Ocado makes you wonder what the likes of Sainsbury's and Tesco have been up to.
It looks like Sainsbury's are now going to belatedly make more investment in automation at their warehouses.
I wonder if there is any scope for one of the other supermarkets to pay Ocado Retail to add their product lines?
That seems to be what the partnership with Groupe Casino is looking to achieve. Rent CFC capacity to other French retailers.
Also wonder that maybe Ocado can afford to play tough with M&S because they could swap them out for Sainsbury's or Tesco.
We do have one of the lowest birthday rates and that's one of the reasons why Korea has such a highest number of robots to humans ratio in the world.
The UK has relied instead on cheap labour rather than investment in technology. This could come back to bite the likes of Sainsbury's in future.
The chart here from Global Data gives an idea of where Ocado stands as a robotics company. The analysis is based on the number of patients filed, what applications they cover and what countries filed in. Worth noting that Myrmex, to the left of Ocado on the chart was bought by them in 2022 so they can really be bumped along to a higher score on the right.
The data goes up to 2021 I believe and they will have filed a lot more since then.
Worth noting Boyo how Walmart have filed a few more patents for robots than Ocado, while running a profitable grocery business.
https://www.retail-insight-network.com/data-insights/innovators-robotics-automated-inventory-management-retail/?cf-view&cf-closed